While high school juniors and seniors are in full-on panic mode because the college application and acceptance process is hitting the fan in earnest for both groups of students, I’m hopeful everyone can manage to remember that college is not a life or death situation. Every adult involved in the life of an upperclassman tends to make it seem as though it is, but I promise you it’s not.

Breathe, people, and read this post in the NY Times education blog, Mom U. Regular columnist, Caren Osten Gerzberg, had her daughter write the post. Nicole is a high school junior and makes some excellent points with regard to the college admissions process and how it relates to the grand scheme of things.

Seriously, you are a single, unimportant speck in the universe. No one actually gives a rat’s ass which institution of higher learning chooses you for matriculation. And in ten years, neither will you. Perspective is a priceless tool.

Further Reading:

Community College vs. University
College Comparison Tool
Awesome Parent
The Coolest College Application Essay Ever
How To (Not) Screw Up the College Apps
Avoiding Six Common College Application Slip-Ups
College Admissions Testing: For and Against
Taking Your Personality Into Account When Making Major Decisions
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
College Admissions—Looking Good Only On Paper

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Kay M. McClenney, whose day job involves being the director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement, is a contributing writer for the NY Times blog, The Choice, which focuses on college admissions advice. Dr. McClenney just posted part 5 of a week-long series answering readers’ questions about community college.

Guidance Office Posts:

Answers About Community Colleges, Part 1
Answers About Community Colleges, Part 2
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 3
Answers on Community Colleges, Part 4
Answers on Community College, Part 5

Further Reading:

Too Much Enrollment, Not Enough Funding
The Community College Guide
Community College Before the Four-Year School
Community College vs. University

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Again with the slapping. This time it’s for the jackasses in charge of higher education in this country. If you still feel they (the schools, the loan people, and the government) aren’t lacking in smarts and high-moral-ground-standing cojones, then please read this excerpt from WSJ’s Journal Editorial Report.

It’s a conversation between Paul Gigot, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and Dan Henninger regarding the cost of college, who’s in charge of making it cost so damn much, and the three-year-degree option. It’s buried three conversations down in the transcripts, so I’m posting the conversation in its entirety.

Also, when I tried to narrow it down to just the really good, informative chunks, ninety-nine percent of the conversation made my slapping hand twitch, so I figured it needed to be posted in complete form. Not long, not boring, and full of jaw-clenching tidbits about the Orwellian state of higher education. (Spoiler alert: They’re all bastards.)

Gigot: It’s a trend that most parents are keeping an anxious eye on: the skyrocketing cost of a college education. According to a new report by the College Board, those costs continued to rise last year despite a 2.1% decline in the Consumer Price Index. Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5%, while prices at private colleges rose 4.4%. Add room and board, and the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college is now more than $15,000 a year. At private colleges, the price tag is $35,000. The sticker shock has led some, including Tennessee senator and former education secretary Lamar Alexander, to push for a three-year degree program at the college level.

We’re back with Dan Henninger and Steve Moore. And also joining us, The Wall Street Journal’s deputy Taste Page editor, Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Naomi, why do college costs keep rising even if the price level doesn’t for everyone else?

Ms. Riley: Well, it’s a third-party-payer system. I mean basically what you have is, colleges know they can keep raising the price, and they know that the government, through financial aid programs and various grants that they give to universities, both public and private, is basically going to pick up the difference. Unfortunately, for middle-class parents, it doesn’t always work out that way. They’re not picking up all of the difference for them, but colleges keep raising the sticker price.

Gigot: Because there’s income limits on who gets the subsidies, but the subsidies are vast–I mean, the Pell Grants, direct grants for people. There are basically subsidized loans, and then there are subsidies for saving for school too, which is how a lot of middle-class parents help. Are you saying there’s a kind of chasing-your-tail quality here? The tuition goes up, subsidies follow, and then the people say, tuition can go up again, and then subsidies have to go up again?

Ms. Riley: That’s absolutely true. And then in addition to that, you also get a kind of arms race among the colleges. I mean, you get a situation where, first of all, it turns out that parents think the college is better if they raise a price. So if you see a $50,000 cost on college–which by the way, happened this year.

Gigot: Where is that?

Ms. Riley: Middlebury College. It costs $50,000 for tuition, room and board.

Gigot: In Vermont.

Ms. Riley: Yes, for this year. Vermont, you know, a very high-cost-of-living state. And, you know, but parents see that sticker price, and they assume, “Oh that must be a great college education.” So, you know, it’s–all of the wrong incentives are in place. And then colleges are spending money on things like landscaping and fancy food programs and Wi-Fi in the bathrooms and, you know, it’s really hard to sort of figure out where the quality is.

Gigot: I have a hard time imagining. I barely used a PC, Dan.

Henninger: Well, you know, it’s going to get worse, Paul. The College Board just reported that private loans last year for college dropped by 50%, while the public federally subsidized loans rose 15%. Now, we also know that the Congress has taken–is going to disadvantage the private loan program, which means that the federal program is–

Gigot: They’re going to put it out of business.

Henninger: They’re going to put it out of business, right, which means that basically colleges are going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. You will never get countervailing price pressure under those circumstances.

Gigot: All right, Steve, is this going to lead to you want to go send your kids to college for only three years?

Moore: Well, you know, Paul, I have an 18- and 16-year-old. I’m listening to these prices that Naomi’s talking about and I’m going to need a big fat pay raise, or else my kids are going to be with me another four years, which is a nightmare.

But look, this is a real issue. It’s going to cost now $200,000 to put a kid through college. You have to start asking yourself the question, “Look, I’ll give you a $200,000 check. Maybe that’s a better way to start your life than going to college.” But Naomi put her finger on the problem. The two areas–I was looking at the inflation rates in health care and education–both of those have booming costs. Education costs have gone triple the rate of inflation over the last decade. And it’s because the people who are getting the service aren’t the ones who are paying for it, and that leads to exploding costs.

Gigot: Naomi?

Ms. Riley: Yeah, I just want to say something about the three-year college costs. You know it’s funny, if you go back to the 1970s, which we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, a lot of colleges actually reduced the length of their semesters, and they said this was to save costs for parents. But of course, the semesters stayed shorter, so kids got less education overall. And the prices never went down. So I think you also have to kind of take these big ideas from schools about saving you money with a grain of salt.

Gigot: The likelihood is that they’d find a way to charge the same amount anyway, even if you only went for three years.

Ms. Riley: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Henninger: But you get a year earlier to start work and pay back those loans.

Gigot: That would be the benefit. It’s an opportunity cost would be lower. But Dan, the government is going to–isn’t going to change any of this. If anything, they’re increasing the subsidies. they want to make Pell Grants an entitlement. Right now, it has to be passed with annual appropriation. They want to make it automatic.

Henninger: Yeah, and, you know, there is a social aspect to this as well. It’s pretty well proven that the payoff to a college education is higher lifetime earnings. The demand for college now is tremendous. People are just going to these colleges. Probably what we need is either online colleges or more colleges to meet the supply.

Gigot: But which college doesn’t necessarily help, does it?

Ms. Riley: No, no. There are a lot of studies that show, if you are a person who got into both Harvard and, say, the University of Arkansas, and you chose the University of Arkansas, your lifetime earnings would not be that much different. Of course one solution is just improving K-12 education.

Gigot: That would help enormously. And you might get higher returns on people who then don’t go to college or go to community colleges.

Ms. Riley: Yeah, the way it used to be.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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The National Review Online has an illuminating article up pointing out the illogicality (and foolishness) of putting too much faith in the warped college rankings system. I’ve said about all I can say (using professional language) about the rankings, so I’ll hold back and let Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift from NRO speak wisely (and way more professionally) instead:

Some of the schools with higher rankings may truly have improved, but the most significant factor is that two of the Barron’s criteria — high-school grades and percentage of applicants accepted — don’t mean what they did a decade ago. Grade inflation, and students’ applying to more schools than they used to, have juiced the numbers to make students look more qualified and schools more selective.

Grade inflation, dubbed “high schools’ skeleton in the closet” by Lehigh University education professor Perry Zirkel, has been a creeping phenomenon for two decades.

Also, whereas college-bound students used to limit applications to a few top choices, it is not unusual for students today to apply to many more. UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute has reported that the percentage of high-school seniors who applied to four or more colleges increased by more than a quarter from 1996 to 2006 and now stands at over 60 percent….. when students in general submit more applications, colleges in general get to reject more applicants — making schools across the board more “selective” by the Barron’s criteria.

And that is why trusting the evil genius rankings machine is a mistake. Be aware of who’s in charge and make decisions accordingly.

Previous Posts, Venting Language Included:

Acceptance
College Rankings
Unigo.com
New System for Ranking Colleges

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Never do I skimp on out-pourings of crankiness regarding the backward and highly ridiculous college ranking “system” (I use the term loosely, and here’s proof of the system’s innate uselessness). It is difficult to write ill-tempered posts of this nature because my eyes keep rolling up in disgust. Plus, I waste an inordinate amount of time deleting foul language and unprofessional remarks about the people responsible for the rankings. I hope your pure souls appreciate how strenuous that last bit was to write, and how much editing was involved. I didn’t even use the word a**, which is practically expected when writing about money-hungry, college-rankings bast**ds. Damn. I was so close.

In the spirit of being more with the optimism and less with the cynical pessimism, here’s a lovely breath of hopeful fresh air (minus the butterflies because I’m not that cheerful): GlobalHigherEd has a guest post about a new and better way to rank colleges and universities. The article was written by Uwe Brandenburg of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE) and CHE Consult, a “think tank and consultancy focusing on higher education reform.”

They’re based in Europe, but I’m hoping that the Europeans will prove the system’s worthiness and the Americans will jump on board. It worked with Vespas.

Old Vespa Ad:

New Vespa Ad:

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image sources: new and old

I was bitching about college rankings about a month ago, and although I do enjoy a good vent, I wish Sam Jackson had told me that soon my pleas would be answered. I understand that the lid had to be kept on the Unigo.com thing, so I’m willing to forgive him.

Because Mr. Jackson and the NY Times Magazine both do such a thorough job of explaining it all, I won’t go into great depth about Unigo.com. I will say that it’s a tremendous undertaking and that the founder, Jordan Goldman, should be commended for utilizing his powers for good.

I say again that annually published college rankings are crap, and have more basis in politics than in fact. This renders them useless for any real research on the part of college student hopefuls and their parents. Finding a college or university that’s the perfect fit is difficult, especially when faced with thousands of possibilities and a finite (or nonexistent) amount of funds available for campus visits.

Unigo.com is a huge step in the right direction toward collecting valuable information about particular colleges and universities and what type of experience a given student might realistically expect to find there. Knowing that this resource is available makes me incredibly happy and has helped to restore my faith in my fellow man.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

You can’t begin to imagine the disappointment I felt last week while on vacation; my laptop was turned off (no Internet, alas) and I knew that I was totally missing out on U.S. News and World Report’s annual college ranking list: America’s Best Colleges 2009.

They put it out every year—hence the “annual”— and the list itself is the proud owner of a pretty high crap factor. It’s fairly widely known at this point that schools work their numbers so as to increase their rankings. So take the list with a grain of salt, and maybe liken the list’s value to that of a ballot box full of “votes” in a country governed by a tyrannical dictatorship.

I’m hopeful that someday soon the fiasco that is College Rankings will be no more, and that a new way to collate, compare and contrast, catalog and categorize (the letter of the day appears to be ‘C’) colleges (there’s another one!) and universities will be implemented. Thankfully, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) is working on it via the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN) initiative.

Until this rash on the a** of higher education clears up, may I suggest prospective college students use their heads to choose a school. Some combination of campus visits, reading the blogs of students currently attending a school of interest, asking current students outright what their school does or doesn’t have to offer, as well as some extensive reading and research that’s based on finding a college which would be a good fit for the prospective student in question, and is not based on erroneous rankings and the degree of name recognition a school has.

I tend to lump the Forbes list and the Princeton Review list in with the above. It’s conceivable that my b.s. detector is hyper-sensitive and those other two lists aren’t quite as noxious. The Princeton Review did add the ‘Green Honor Roll’ category to this year’s list, and the rankings are based on student surveys. However, they only surveyed 15% of the four-year schools in the U.S., which seems less than complete to me. Maybe use the book as a shallow jumping-off point. The list Forbes came up with has questionable methodology, including using Rate My Professor and Who’s Who in America. Although, to be fair, no college presidents were involved in the surveying and if attending a school with a high number of Who’s Who greats is your thing, then who am I to argue?

Further Reading:

What Makes a College Good?
College Officials Criticize Rankings
‘U.S. News’ Sees Drop in Participation
Harvard Reclaims Top Spot in Latest U.S. News List
The College Rankings Revolt
A Better Way To Rank America’s Colleges
Rankings Tail Wags the Dog
Assessing Learning Outcomes

Posted by Alexa Harrington

High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).

Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.

High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.

College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

U.S. News & World Report came out with their annual “Best College” rankings edition online today, the magazine will be on the newsstands on August 20th. Any changes? This group of schools looks strikingly similar to the 2007 rankings despite the magazine’s vows to make “substantial changes in methodology.” The top ten is still dominated by brand names and Ivies, and the top 3 spots haven’t budged. Umm, let’s see, the University of Pennsylvania moved up from #7 to #5…

The Best Values section will be far more valuable to students who are researching which colleges to attend: Where Applying Early May Help, Schools That Award the Most (and Least) Need-Based Aid and Schools Whose Freshmen Are Least (and Most) Likely to Return

Best National Universities 2008

1. Princeton University (NJ)
2. Harvard University (MA)
3. Yale University (CT)
4. Stanford University (CA)
5. California Institute of Technology
6. University of Pennsylvania
7. Massachusetts Inst. Of Technology
8. Duke University (NC)
9. Columbia University (NY)
10. University of Chicago
11. Dartmouth College (NH)
12. Cornell University (NY)
13. Washington University in St. Louis
14. Brown University (RI)
15. Johns Hopkins University (MD)
16. Northwestern University (IL)
17. Emory University (GA)
18. Rice University (TX)
19. University of Notre Dame (IN)
20. Vanderbilt University (TN)
21. University of California – Berkeley
22. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
23. Georgetown University (DC)
24. University of Virginia
25. University of California – Los Angeles
25. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

Universities with Highest Retention Rates 2008
When looking at college rankings and college stats, an important factor in determining quality is a retention rate above 80%. Of course there is a lot of overlap with the Best National Universities list at the top, but you’ll find many gems with retention rates above 80%.

1. Yale University (CT) – 98%
2. University of Pennsylvania – 98%
3. University of Notre Dame (IN) – 98%
4. Stanford University (CA) – 98%
5. Princeton University (NJ) – 98%
6. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology – 98%
7. Harvard University (MA) – 98%
8. Dartmouth College (NH) – 98%
9. Columbia University (NY) – 98%
10. Washington University in St. Louis – 97%
11. University of Virginia – 97%
12. University of Chicago – 97%
13. Univ. of California–Los Angeles – 97%
14. University of California–Berkeley – 97%
15. Rice University (TX) – 97%
16. Northwestern University (IL) – 97%
17. Georgetown University (DC) – 97%
18. Duke University (NC) – 97%
19. California Institute of Technology – 97%
20. Brown University (RI) – 97%
21. U. of North Carolina–Chapel Hill – 96%
22. University of Michigan–Ann Arbor – 96%
23. Tufts University (MA) – 96%
24. Johns Hopkins University (MD) – 96%
25. Cornell University (NY) – 96%
26. Vanderbilt University (TN) – 95%
27. Univ. of Southern California – 95%
28. College of William and Mary (VA) – 95%
29. Brandeis University (MA) – 95%
30. Boston College – 95%
31. Wake Forest University (NC) – 94%
32. University of Rochester (NY) – 94%
33. University of Florida – 94%
34. Univ. of California–San Diego – 94%
35. University of California–Irvine – 94%
36. Lehigh University (PA) – 94%
37. Emory University (GA) – 94%
38. Carnegie Mellon University (PA) – 94%

Numerical rankings of colleges are out. Hot lists are in. Newsweek created a list of “today’s most interesting schools” that they call the “hottest” universities in the U.S. In light of the spanking that U.S. News and World Report received, Newsweek took pains to point out that this list is subjective.

What’s wrong with good old “best”?

We’ve talked to a range of experts—admissions officials, educational consultants, students, parents, and college and university leaders—in making our selections. We’ve been particularly influenced by the views of high-school counselors, the people most in tune with what matters to the latest wave of college applicants.

Hottest Ivy
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Hottest for Sports Fans
University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.

Hottest Men’s College
Morehouse College, Atlanta, Ga

Hottest for No SAT or ACT Needed
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

Hottest for Science and Engineering
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

Hottest Liberal-Arts School You Never Heard Of
Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, La.

Hottest for Rejecting You
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Hottest for Election Year
Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, Calif.

Hottest on The Rebound
Tulane University, New Orleans, La.

Hottest for Free Tuition
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, N.Y.

Hottest Mega-University
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.

Hottest Catholic School
Fordham University, New York, N.Y.

Hottest Big-City School
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

Hottest for Pre-Meds
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.

Hottest in the War on Terror
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, N.M.

Hottest Small State School
State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, N.Y.

Hottest for Liberal Arts
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

Hottest for First-Generation Students
Queens College (City University of New York), Queens, N.Y.

Hottest for Loving the Great Outdoors
St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s, Md.

Hottest Women’s College
Smith College, Northampton, Mass

Hottest Music School
Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y.

Hottest for Saving America’s Schools
University of Texas-Austin, Austin, Texas

Hottest Big State School
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wis.

Hottest for International Studies
University of Richmond, Richmond, VA.

Hottest for Business
Babson College, Babson Park, Mass.

college | university